Tuesday, April 5, 2011

D - Day

Ever wonder how a day can sometimes feel too short, or sometimes too long, when in fact we always have the same amount of time?

Today's letter is D, and I chose the word Day.

As Melissa Ford brought to my attention on her most recent post in Stirrup Queens: Time, Attention, and Internet Brouhahas, we have 1440 minutes in a day! Honestly, I have been obsessed for the longest time now, about living one day at a time but never bothered to look up exactly how minutes I am blessed with each and every single day.

Like the previous entries to the A - Z Challenge, it is never a challenge for me to come up with a word but to choose a word from the many that comes flooding in my mind.

Last night, I kept thinking perhaps I should, write D for Depression, an ailment I have been battling for almost two decades now.

When I began blogging anonymously in 2006, my battles with depression, was what I could say drove me subconsciously to writing in the ether space of the internet. On the conscious level, it was to reconnect once again with the writing community.

I could say I have written a lot of cathartic blogs about my experience of it. Of course not every single post was about it!

For some reasons though, I did not want to have it as part of my word list in the A to Z Challenge.

Not out of shame; not all. This blog is all about moving forward, affirming the positives, empowering one-self with the small simple successes that each day brings, squeezing the loveliest essence (and fragrance!) of the day, which best helps one to jump up out of bed the following morning to greet the new day with vigour.

an archive picture of what I look at when I start my day

While on the bike this morning a children song kept playing in my head - the intro music of Germany's version of Sesame street (another D word idea I wanted to use: Der, Die Das). I was on the way home from bringing the girls to school, freezing because I stubbornly wore a vest despite the temperature sinking, after the couple of warm Spring days over the weekend. The view all around me, which I passed by on our bike route to school and back made my heart warm all over though.

collage of my morning, please click for better view

I guess the song Der, Die, Das kept playing in my mind while I took pleasure with what was around me because there is joy in the everyday, that I feel my curiousity and childlike happiness builds up as I once knew it.

Even when the D for Depression still tries to take centerstage, it now becomes more, and more upstaged by the D for Day, which I made the main star of my life.

I have (re)learned to filter again what is most beneficial for my health and that of my family. Now, there are only days for positive affirmation, and less lamentation.